Friday, June 29, 2018

Guest: Patrick Batuello, animal rights activist and Director of Horse Racing Wrongs (horseracingwrongs.com), talks about his organization's work in education and grassroots advocacy to stop the cruelty and unnecessary deaths of animals used in professional racing.

Eli did this interview on his iPhone at the track. It has great background sounds with crowds cheering and cars going by. I think we will do more of these on site interviews in the field.

Patrick is a dedicated worker for animal rights. He sees a wrong and works tirelessly to bring people's attention to it. The fact that so many horses die from these races takes a little of the glamor out of what is really a cruel spectacle: doped up animals running for their lives.

All of us have an inherent empathy for defenseless animals. We have to be trained to put these feelings aside when we exploit animals for a living. It is a little like basic training in the military, where you are trained to "kill" your fellow human being. In bayonet training we had to run down a short track and thrust our blade into a lifelike dummy, all the while yelling "kill, kill, kill." We learn to celebrate killing at the track too.

Tuesday, June 19, 2018

Guest: Yonatan Shapira, former Israeli air force pilot, co-founder of the Israeli-Palestinian Combatants for Peace, BDS activist, and sailor on the Jewish Boat to Gaza when it was attacked for breaking the siege of Gaza, talks about his career as a singer and how his songs express the hope for a free Palestine.

Yonatan Shapira is hero of human rights, a man of integrity who changed his mind once he faced the irrefutable facts about Israel's long term occupation of Palestine. How he changed his mind is his story, going from a pilot in the Israeli Defense Force, to an outspoken critic of Israeli apartheid.

He makes the journey with humility and not without pain. If Israel ever recovers its place in the human race, it will come as a result of following a person like Yonatan.

One of his stories involves a German commander during World War II who wrote of his ethical misgivings while fighting for the Third Reich. To Yonatan, what one man writes in his diary does not absolve him from blame. And the day of reckoning comes, of course, when Yonatan sees himself in the very same position. Doubts are not enough; one must actively oppose genocide and ethnic cleansing. He is as unsparing of himself as he is of anyone else.

Yonatan's songs in Hebrew are the emotional culmination of his very personal stories. His deep and compelling voice brings the listener closer to a self realization about activism and courage. Singing along in Hebrew takes us to a new understanding of our own role in the resistance.

Friday, June 8, 2018

Guest Section: We pay tribute to Jay Wenk, World War II veteran, author, and Palestinian human rights activist. We will hear a recoded excerpt from Jay's memorable book: "Study War No More: A Jewish Kid from Brooklyn Fights the Nazis," followed by another veteran, this time from Israel. Yonatan Shapira will sing about the Palestinians returning to their homeland.

We talked a little about Jay Wenk after we played a recording of him reading from his book. The section of the book we decided reflected the gentle man he was. Even after years of fighting the Nazis in World War II, he was able to express tenderness for a captured German soldier, who was bringing letters back to men's families. Maybe that was the link to former Israeli pilot, Yonatan Shapira. Both were fighters who eventually turned their backs against war and mindless brutality.

Were all soldiers like that, we wouldn't be fighting these endless wars for profit and global hegemony. That is why listening to them is so important.

Yonatan will be our guest next week, talking about and then singing one of his antiwar songs.

Guest: Nicolas J.S. Davies, author of "Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq," and the Consortium News series on the death toll in U.S.'s post-9/11 wars, talks about the empire's next military targets.

CLASS WARS BLOG

Class Wars Blog is an inside look at the production of Activist Radio: what went right, what went wrong, and what got left out. In fact, we plan to post just about anything we feel is interesting, including listeners' comments.